The Macedonians drank like fish...all of them.
And yet, here the thing, how many of the other companions died of "heavy drinking"...well, there were those fellows that froze to death after Calanus's funeral...but that's what happens when you pass out under the table outside on a cold night..
The "morality" aspect that it was because Alexander and Hephaistion, apparantly of all the main characters drank above and beyond and so got their "just deserts", because that's what happens when you drink and are super powerful...at least the Athenians and the Romans might have thunk it...
Dissipation is one of the themes of the "vulgate"...and who else drank themsleves to death (and he very probably did,) Demetrios Poliorcetes after having fouled up one last time and getting parked in a pleasant prison by Seleucus.
And the story of Philip's wedding, where he got so drunk he tried to spear his own son, but thankfully for the son, was too drunk...and yet we don't see this reaction to him.
That is one thing that does tend to lead me towards a possible desire to knock off both or either of the brother-in-laws...because everyone drank, many of the Diadochi had been wounded or ill during the campaign and still managed to survive, till they killed each other. In the end, men in their 70's and 80's still leading troops...
Because all the other hard drinking SOBs survived, their own hard partying is less reported than ATG's and the mysterious death of Hephaistion, either he drank too much BEFORE he got sick or on the last day the drinking killed him...there may or may not have been the fowl..the story varies...
It's just something that should be noted...because we will never know and the ax grinding began before their graves were cold. Literature is lost, things are unknown.
But this all reminds me of a review of Bosworth's
Alexander and the East....
http://web.archive.org/web/200303051141 ... alex3.html
In one part, the author of the review, Victor Parker discusses the murder of Cleitus
For Bosworth the whole scene is "chilling"; his depiction of it heavily laden with the vocabulary of a morality play in which flatterers, who are speaking at the instigation of Alexander have all learnt by heart the lines they must say, now begin to build up a "royal cult of personality" (p. 101) and to maintain that Alexander was "invincible and godlike" (p. 100) owing to his "superhuman achievement" (p. 103). After the flatterers deliver their parts, Clitus in surprisingly coherent fashion for a man who is drunk inveighs against them and, inebriation notwithstanding, manages to quote a devastatingly apt passage from Euripides' Andromache.10 For Bosworth, Clitus' poetic proclivities show that his speech was born "of long mental rehearsal" (p. 101): after all, in this morality play everyone did have his lines to learn and his own rôle to play. Alexander, with surprising patience for a man drunk, listens to this dramatic monologue and at the end, when Alxander kills Clitus, it proves for Bosworth that Alexander had instructed the flatterers in what to say and that he truly believed in what they were saying. Clitus challenged this; therefore Clitus had to die; exeunt omnes.
Yet still one must ask if this careful scripting of parts, the apposite quotation from an Attic tragedian, the long monologue of Clitus', listened to apparently without interruption by Alexander - if any of this be credible. Did Clitus really speak those lines from the Andromache, or did some later author insert them into his mouth so that he might have something truly pithy and literary to say? And does this entire incident really prove anything other than that Alexander did not appreciate criticism - who of us does? - and that drink did not improve his temper - whose does it? Is it sound scholarship to turn a drunken brawl into a morality play with deeper, subtle psychological meanings? And was such a drunken brawl finally out of character for the Macedonian court?
In a nutshell, for me, he has pegged what I find annoying about the "Alexander, all evil, all the time" school of thought...to the point of contradiction...
In another part of the review he also brings up something that I think also gets lost in the very anachronistic view that he of all the people, all the conquerors, of the ancient world was murderous..and those "poor defenseless people"...*raises hand to stop Paralus from typing "Rubbish!" before I finish. In a perfect world there would be no conquest, and certainly in the modern world, conquest and war are hideous (I am no neocon believe me..)
But lost in that is this really, I think, unconscious chauvinsism for lack of the word I can't think of right now...those "poor, defenseless
not European people...". "Just not up to the uberman onslaught of Alexander..and so their deaths at his hands are all that much worse, because he should have been better.." or some such twaddle...though the empires and warrior cultures did their own amount of enormous killing and conquering...though to his credit, they say, Asoka was so disgusted with himself, he quit and became a Buddhist monk, just as Chandragupta became a Jain.
The Sogdians didn't have the massive hill forts just for grins and they weren't erected simply because of Alexander...Nanda didn't have thousands of war elephants and a gigantic army for nothing...(though is what we read here, another inflation of numbers? How big were the Indian Armies, the Paersian Armies, the Indian cities, really?).."No really, the fish was THIS big!"...
I get a whiff of the "White Man's Burden" at times reading some of the scholars. I am sure they would be aghast and insulted, but as Parker noted, descibing a people as simple and naive, a people who he knows squat all about really, is patronising to those people who fought, died and perhaps outwitted Alexander on more than one occassion.
So while I'm at it...like in the other thread, about ATG being a bottle that can be filled...whenever I want to go with a specific scenario, because it might suit my worldview..I ask myself..exactly how did Callisthenes die? Which of the many deaths described is the one I want to pick...what to do? What to do?
Anyway...Alexander could have died in a lot of ways, but it sounds like he had a fairly protracted illness following wounds, grief and drowning his sorrows for 7 or 8 months prior to his death...though the degree of that sorrow drowning seems to depend again on whose propaganda (including the Royal Diaries) you want to believe. Hephaistion, again, that is more curious...because it doesn't fit, as described, any illness, including Typhoid or Typhus...too short, the recovery and the almost instant death...but as has been pointed out by others brighter than me...Alexander apparantly didn't suspect anyone, so who knows what was lost?
As for hating Alexander? I think there was less hate than exhaustion. As for hating Hephaistion, he had quarrels with Crateros and Eumenes...but despite he and his mentor both being dead, you'd think that a bit of the "hate" for him would show in the literature (aside from the Cardian camp...and perhaps Chares...another who would might have found his position diminished by Hephaistion's rise..).
Sort of "You want to get rid of me, fine! Let's see what you can do amongst yourselves."
